• by February 7, 2001

By Adam Bernard

When you hear the phrase "Yellow Rat Bastard," the first thing that may come to mind is a vision of an inebriated bar patron starting a fight. But if you're Dr. Samir Husni, (a.k.a. Mr. Magazine), Yellow Rat Bastard means a magazine he named as one of the top 30 launches for the year 2000.

"Anyone who's willing to put out a magazine called 'Yellow Rat Bastard' deserves to be recognized," said Husni, who also chose such magazines as O, the Oprah Magazine, and Martha Stewart Baby for the list. "You can't see the name without stopping," he said, adding that of all the magazines on his list, this one best represented pop culture.

YRB taps a part of society few magazines have ventured into. David Ishay, publisher of YRB, notes, "It came to our attention that an underground culture had been developing that was being ignored. It was not isolated, it was international, and they all seemed to appreciate the kind of products, styling, and the underlying philosophy we were offering. As a result, we got a lot of requests to try and convey that. They wanted a piece of it even though they didn't live in SOHO [a trendy, urban section of NYC]."

YRB was actually a clothing store before it was a magazine, and that feature is attractive to some of its advertisers, like Sandra Mihalenko from the School of Hard Knocks. She said, "one good thing about [advertising in YRB] is that they carry our products, and [by placing an ad in it] the sales increase at the store."

The magazine itself deals with city culture, and the median reader age is around 21. Ishay explained, "we basically are the reference point of a certain underground extreme. Anything that's mainstream they basically reject." The cover of the fall issue features a school girl sitting on a toilet with YRB panties below her knees. As Husni said, "it's a stopper."

Husni warned that "just because I select something as most notable, it doesn't mean it's going to be the most successful."

Mihalenko thinks YRB will be, though, saying "they really have a hold of downtown street culture, and a very specific consumer. We've seen them grow, and seen the magazine get 100% better every time a new issue comes out."

Right now a 4-color full page ad can run as high as $17,000 in the quarterly publication (that's with a national circulation of 200,000+). One of the more interesting aspects of YRB is that half of it is a magazine, and half is a seasonal catalogue for the store, and Ishay says at this point there's no plans to change that format.

YRB also has no plans for offering ad space on its website - www.yellowratbastard.com. Ishay says, "we don't sell internet ads, not right now anyway, but we really don't plan on it." He says the purpose of the website is to reflect the content of the issue.

That being said, sections of the latest magazine like "Chicks Making Out," or the article written by former porn star Annie Sprinkle, may scare away some advertisers. Ishay says of the potential